ABSTRACT
The Pretoria Convention turned on a nicety: the behaviour and response of the South African Dutch. In the case of Kimberley his natural desire for coercion in Ireland became almost vituperative, and he looked on the policy of the Pretoria Convention rather uneasily. The Pretoria Convention was designed in Whitehall to fulfil a particular function: to provide a smoke-screen to cover revocation of the annexation, and to conciliate the South African Afrikaners by this apparent act of magnanimity. The Cabinet of Friday, 29 April,3 the first for three weeks, was told by Kimberley that Wood had opened the Royal Commission at Newcastle, Robinson being detained at the Cape. The story of 1881 is thus the complex narrative of interrelated attempts by Gladstone and Kimberley to place the two most intractable dilemmas in the Empire on a way to tolerable solution, through the balm of conciliation.
